Coherent Replaced Zipped Email Attachments With Files.com Inboxes Tied to Salesforce Cases in Days

Coherent Corp. is a global photonics leader: engineered materials, optoelectronic components, and laser systems for the industrial, communications, electronics, and instrumentation markets. The company is vertically integrated from raw materials to finished systems, operates in more than 20 countries, and runs about 110 locations across the globe.

Its lasers and instruments run inside other companies' factories, labs, and networks. An installed base of 8,000 to 10,000 systems in the field is supported by roughly 600 Coherent field engineers, and when one of those systems needs attention, the diagnosis starts with a file: the customer bundles up log data and sends it back to Coherent. A business built on a global installed base was always going to live or die by how well those files get home.

The Standard Intake Was a Zip File in an Email

For years, the instruction to customers was simple: zip the log files so they clear the mail filters, and email them to your field engineer.

That habit carried a lot of traffic. In a single two-month window, a thousand distinct external sender domains emailed zip files into Coherent. And it carried real costs. Each file landed in one engineer's personal mailbox, with no connection to the support case it belonged to and no record anyone else could find. Anything larger than the mail system's attachment cap could not be sent at all, and diagnostic bundles are often exactly that large. A thousand senders were pushing business-critical files through a channel with no governance, no structure, and a hard size ceiling.

Then security policy ended it. Coherent's CIO blocked zip attachments in external inbound mail company-wide, and the block was announced one day and enforced the next. The standard channel for customer files into the global service organization was gone before a replacement existed.

A Replacement for Senders Who Would Never Have Accounts

The replacement had a hard shape. The senders were customers: thousands of organizations, sending occasionally, always in connection with a specific ticket. They could not be pre-provisioned as accounts, and they could not be asked to install anything. Each file had to land tied to the support case it belonged to, not in an undifferentiated pile, because support automation runs downstream of the intake. And it had to be live in days, because the ban was already in force.

Ruedi Hinz, Coherent's Director of Corporate IT Infrastructure, knew the shape of the answer from the other side of the relationship:

“If I have a support ticket, they say, 'Create a bundle of your log files, and use that temporary SFTP service with this password, upload the file, and then the next time it's a different one with a different case number,' so it's all temporary.”

That was the model: a drop point per ticket. What Coherent wanted was that pattern as a permanent, branded channel of its own, running under Coherent's name rather than improvised one ticket at a time. Coherent built it on Files.com, the platform that already carried its automated file exchange with suppliers and contract manufacturers.

An Upload Page Tied to Every Support Ticket

A Files.com Inbox is a standing, branded upload page that accepts files from people who have no account. Coherent attached a custom registration form that captured the support case number and thread ID and pre-filled it: the link a customer received carried the ticket's parameters in the URL, so the customer clicked, confirmed, and uploaded.

Files.com automatically created a subfolder for each submission from the form fields, so every inbound file landed in a folder named for the Salesforce support ticket it belonged to, and Coherent's downstream support automation used that folder name to route it. The intake was stood up immediately after the block took effect.

The Mandate Held and the Files Kept Coming

With the Inbox workflow in production, Coherent replaced an intake channel built on email attachments with a governed upload path wired into its support system.

• The service organization kept receiving customer files. A security mandate enforced overnight, which could have stranded a global field operation, was absorbed in days.
• Every inbound file arrives already filed. It lands in a folder named for its case and thread, where automation picks it up. No engineer pulls attachments out of a mailbox and sorts them by hand.
• The size ceiling is gone. Log bundles that could never fit through email go through the same page as everything else.
• The channel is governed. Every registration and upload is recorded, and the exchange runs under Coherent's name on storage its IT team controls, instead of across a thousand senders' email threads.

The immediate result was continuity. The standing result is the pattern: external file intake now has one governed front door instead of a thousand mailbox destinations, and putting another workflow behind it means another Files.com Inbox with its own form, not another exception to the security policy.

One Governed Front Door for Customer Files

Today, a customer with an instrument that needs attention gets a link tied to their ticket, and the log bundle arrives on a Coherent-branded page, filed against the case before an engineer ever touches it. The temporary per-ticket drop that Coherent's own vendors used to hand out now exists as Coherent's permanent, owned channel, on its Files.com site, with a record of everything that passes through.

The ban on zip attachments held, and the service organization it could have broken barely broke stride. A company can shut the door on email attachments without shutting out its customers, provided the files have somewhere better to go: a front door that already knows which case every file belongs to.